Episode 94: The Midnight Gospel Part 2 - Looking at the source material
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So… last episode I talked about The Midnight Gospel, a Netflix original that taps into the human impulse for connection, particularly in the face of what we would consider to be overwhelming and which just happened to come out in a time when everything was just starting to get super overwhelming particularly because we were now spending time with our own thoughts when the sourdough starter was just chilling or when the last episode of Tiger King was finishing up.
I found this show on Netflix when I was randomly scrolling for content. Ironically, I was trying to use the sound from… something to keep the existential dread at bay, but that’s a surprisingly difficult search. Like, yes, there’s a bunch of content on Netflix and other streaming services. I even have a paid membership to VRV and Hulu, and it would be great if I had an affiliate link to VRV considering how random mentioning it is.
But anyway, I spent last episode talking more about the substance of The Midnight Gospel in general terms. I.e., what the show meant to me, in all its many pieces and for all its beauty. But at the… figurative end of the day, this is still an adaptation. This show takes the audio of a podcast and turns it into an adult animated show with pretty amazing visuals. However, I still think there’s more to say about The Midnight Gospel. After all, it’s an interesting concept: taking audio recorded under a certain circumstance and repurposing it or adapting it to tell a different but still somewhat clear narrative. Yes, the meat of each episode does largely stand on its own, and the connecting threads that tie all the episodes together can be shelved and set aside, which you’re somewhat tempted to do in the face of world-building rules that constantly catch you off-guard.
Regardless, when you accept that there are things you just take to accept at face value--an ongoing theme within the podcast as a whole, it turns out--you end up with a beautiful encapsulation of the spirit not just of the Duncan Trussell Family Hour but of podcasting as a whole.
In this example is a fairly strong guide for what adaptations need to be and accomplish. Which is something that--despite all the opinions I have about it--I haven’t really explained. Or if I have, kudos to you who remember when I did it because I certainly don’t. I know I did talk about my thoughts on what makes a good, almost decade after the fact sequel, the sort of story that was not planned but just occurred as an afterthought some time later when nostalgic reboots were all the rage. Those ideas admittedly covered a lot of the same bases, but I think there is a bit more to the story.
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Hi. It’s M. Welcome to episode 94.
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Also in the last episode, I gave you a bit of background information about where The Midnight Gospel came from, but I think I somewhat glossed over the ‘how I started watching it’ part of the story. Or in some ways, it seems painfully straightforward and in others it doesn’t. Confusing yes, but okay, here’s the conundrum. When I play a television show in the background of my life, even though the task is somewhat basic and therefore, you would think the qualifications for such a piece of media would be minimal at best, it’s surprisingly a difficult decision to make. I need something that can fill the silence, but if I need a break from whatever I’m doing, I should be able to glance at whatever thing is playing and be somewhat engaged in that. It’s like a different part of my brain needs to be at the helm for a little bit while the other part gets a break. And I need something that can help with that. Now does that mean that sometimes I get distracted ? Yes It happens quite a bit. But my inability to focus aside, finding content that can both be ignored and yet is worth not ignoring is a difficult balance. Usually, it ends up being shows I’ve seen before or the sort of sappy, very inaccurate but weirdly entertaining historical fiction shows. You might know the kind. You might have the same guilty pleasures. Or more.
Anyway, as you might have noticed, The Midnight Gospel does not fall into that category. So why did I pick it? Well, it’s hard to piece together. I’ve been rewatching the show, and I think that influences the promotional blurb Netflix shows you when you pull it up. Maybe. But it’s not like I remember what the blurb was when I saw it or if that was the reason why I clicked on it. Which might not be relevant. It’s just that I asserted that the creative decision to use podcast audio wasn’t readily apparent. And it would be great if I could prove that, but no such luck on that front.
Maybe I was just feeling confident that this was going to be a halfway decent show. After all, it is a Netflix original, and Netflix has a pretty good track record of green lighting quality adult animation. Think Bojack Horseman or Tuca & Bertie. It’s renewing those shows that Netflix sometimes has a hard time with. Think Bojack Horseman--a show that according to the creators had a couple more seasons to it--and Tuca & Bertie--a show that had a lot more life in it but was cut off after season one. But The Midnight Gospel was only on its first season, and I haven’t learned to try to avoid getting emotionally attached to things that Netflix will shortly take away from me. So I gave it a try. And nothing got done that day because I was drawn in for all the reasons I mentioned in the last episode.
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But speaking of… In the last episode, I mentioned that The Midnight Gospel represented--to me--connection over difficult subjects in a difficult time. It meant connection in a way and context that we often deny ourselves, and in many ways, that’s what podcasting has been to me as a whole. And to a lot of us, I would bet.
Whether or not I did it well, notwithstanding, I’ve said before that podcasting isn’t a regulated space. Unless you actually do something morally reprehensible--or even if you do, sadly enough--the door on this medium isn’t locked. Mostly because there is no door, doorway, or wall. There is no singular company that has undertaken the brunt of hosting costs--instead it’s spread amongst podcasters--and so, there is no company that has any sort of real interest in creating a sort of image. Because Apple doesn’t have to regulate the relationship between content creators and advertisers, they don’t have to care what the content is, and that’s what differentiates podcasting from something like YouTube or even TikTok. There’s no judgment call, whether manual or by algorithm, so while all new media mediums have plenty of space for communities around niche interests to take root, there’s absolutely nothing stopping someone from finding a show catered to their specific, very specific, interests. And nothing to stop a creator from indulging.
This can materialize in a couple of ways. Whatever content you want to hear, you will be able to find, but it also can mean finding shows that draw you in not just from its substance but also by its character. It’s not just things you want to hear about, but it can also be conversations that mean something to you in one form or another. Podcasting, in a really bad summary, is that opportunity. It’s the opportunity to see a vast table laid out before you and engaging in what you want no matter how niche or otherwise frowned upon with pretty much no limits. Or limits that only vaguely exist and are actually ones we may want more not less of. Because anything can be brought into it. Ethics notwithstanding.
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Now, like I also said in the last episode, I’ve been working through the back catalog of the Duncan Trussell Family Hour. It’s a great podcast but needed to get a lot more listening in before I made any substantive judgments. And then again, if you’re a fan of that podcast, you might say that it wasn’t necessary. Duncan Trussell is a great podcast host and seems like a really nice guy. Which I agree with. Not even in a parasocial relationship type way. I can listen to him talk for quite a bit of time without interruption. And it is because he is such a good host who doesn’t make the episodes about him. He’s good at connecting to his guests and going along with whatever journey they want to take him on. He is good at listening and knows when to draw from his own experiences.
In some ways, he’s good at being… Well, not quite a friend. That’s getting way too close to the parasocial bond-thing-slash-problem. The real message that I’m offering is that Duncan Trussell is good at connecting with his guests and--to a great extent--his audience. The exact form of this art is harder to pick out, probably because there’s large swatches of the interaction being host and guest that the audience isn’t privy too. We can only see how Duncan Trussell maintains conversation momentums and the general conversational tone of each episode. We don’t know how he welcomed them into the studio, how he broke the ice, etc, etc.
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And that gap is actually what The Midnight Gospel plays into by… Well, negating the issue.
The Midnight Gospel captures the essence of the podcast and actually makes that the center point of the show. Which… Okay, you might think that ‘obvious point is obvious,’ and you aren’t wrong. Clancy has a spacecast, like a podcast, and he is interviewing guests for his spacecast. Those guests just happen to live in different worlds and under different circumstances, which you could also say about the various people that come onto a podcast. We all live our own lives influenced by viewpoints of the shared world that could--by some standards--be different worlds in and of themselves. And the experiences and circumstances of our lives might be similar, sometimes, but not all the time. And when they are different they can be super different. Like different planet levels of difference.
So since we started from a shared point, maybe you see where I’m going with this. The Midnight Gospel leaned into the nature of the audio. It created a more extreme version of the circumstances you find within the podcast and played with the space around it. Not just in crafting a story between the gaps, but also by creating and crafting outstanding visuals to go along with it. Ultimately, this is somewhat like a nest for the heart that is the podcast to rest itself within. It doesn’t tear away at the audio for scraps to sustain itself. It doesn’t try to peel away the varnish of the podcast just to wear it as an ill-fitting skin. Instead it magnifies what is there. Not by providing any sort of contrast but by expanding upon it.
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The expansion on what is there would be the main point or the main takeaway. Truth be told, that’s how I had originally designed and scripted this episode, but I had to actually go back to the script and play with it, moving pieces around, you know the deal, so what was going to be a later than usual episode had to be an outright late episode when the news was announced that the audio fiction Archive 81 was getting a Netflix adaptation. Because honestly, that news makes me a little nervous. Not because I have anything against Archive 81 or its creators nor do I doubt their intentions or ability. I just worry this is not going to work out. I worry that this is going to be more like Netflix’s attempts at doing live action adaptations of animes like Death Note or Mob Psycho 100, which went poorly if you didn’t know. And they went poorly, I would say, because there was an inherent competition and friction between what Netflix could or was able to offer and the anime had given its audience. Mob Psycho 100 is actually the better example of this. The outlandish animation played into and worked with the show’s humor. Which right off the bat was something that couldn’t be replicated. And so repeatedly Netflix had to cut corners in order to capture the essence of the plot but stripping away the nature and the humor of the show. Mob Psycho 100 is a show that is inherently funny. It is a show that subverts expectations in a way that live action just couldn’t do.
With audio fiction, the absence of canon visuals means the audience can make whatever they want to. They can fill in the gaps as they see fit, imposing whatever views or hopes they have onto the source material. In a two people talking podcast, there is an intrinsic parameter: you have to have two people sitting in a room with mics or in different rooms with mics and Zoom running on their computer. You might have little side visuals akin to an animatic, but you know that’s not what is actually happening and simply decided to treat yourself that day.
And yes, on the other hand, there are podcasts like the Oz 9 with canon illustrations of their characters clearly established and available for merch. But Archive 81 is more of a show that lives in the animation of the listener or of the listener’s mind, and that may end up being a difficult balance to strike. Or it may not be. To go back to an earlier example, part of the issue with the Death Note adaptation wasn’t the visuals, but the way the writer and director showed their failure to understand the themes of the source material. Instead they offered a vision that competed on a fundamental level and was then squarely rejected.
The Midnight Gospel was able to side step this because it was occupying a space without competition. There was no canon, so it could do whatever it wanted or needed to do. And there is wisdom in going that route: in creating something that wasn’t there in the space that was offered to you. But to take that advice or wisdom as gospel is only stifling creative freedom. Archive 81 deserves an adaptation, but it deserves a good one that captures the strength of the original and gives it more room to grow and expand into itself, particularly in a way that leads with the strengths of the show much like The Midnight Gospel was able to do by structuring a narrative around the host and keeping episodes somewhat disjointed, allowing for animation styles to adapt.
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This is where things get hairy. Or there’s potential for it. While it’s been a while since I heard Archive 81, I remember one of the show’s main appeals being its worldbuilding through things like carefully orchestrated sound design, especially the first season, a season that had to navigate the ‘found footage’ story structure, coupled with the writing of that ‘found footage’ story which then gave it some room to expand in an organic way. Presumably, you find more things across time after starting with a somewhat limited state.
That’s the vision that Netflix’s creative team may or may not be able to handle. Obviously doing a one-to-one adaptation is squandering an opportunity and may not work because you still have to fill in the visual component, but creative choices made on that project need to capture the spirit of the show and not compete with it. Which--much like my standards for filler TV shows--can be straightforward but really isn’t. Beyond that vague word of wisdom, I certainly don’t have any guidance on the matter. It’s easier to see what doesn’t work than what does. Or… Correction, I don’t have much guidance, but I do have one note. And that is to have people who earnestly care about the original content working on the show.
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That’s the other lesson from the original version of this script that I was able to grab and put here. Because, you see, in addition to Duncan Trussell’s voice--and birthdate for a release date--the show drew from the talents of The Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward who--by all accounts--was a big fan of the Duncan Trussell Family Hour after hearing about the podcast from a friend. In part, Pendleton Ward was enamoured by Trussell’s ability to take a long conversation about meditation and make it entertaining.
That’s not the whole story, though. The story starts in 2013 and frequently features Ward taking the lead in designing and pitching the concept. But through it all, he consistently leans into what first caught his attention. And that turned out to be as good of a starting point as any. After all, a journey of a thousand miles may begin with a single step, but you also need to make sure you’re walking on the right path. Otherwise, that thousand mile journey could turn into a two thousand mile journey. And nobody wants that.
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This has been a production of Miscellany Media Studios with music licensed from the Sounds like an Earful music supply. Thanks for listening! Find more information about our shows at miscellanymedia.online or follow us on Twitter @miscellanymedia for updates on current and future projects.
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